Down & dirty. Every sense of the term.
I try to play to win because how else will I ever increase my tourney skills? There’s this idea that you don’t need to practice these easy moves to be good at them. That’s perhaps true for other players but certainly not for me. Even something as seemingly simple as claw’s wall dive benefits greatly from good timing; there are actually very few situations where a wall dive is 100% safe but a large number of people either don’t know the proper counters or can’t execute them.
When you compromise raw, effective strategy with flash and lesser tactics, you develop bad habits (or at least I do). And in a tourney setting, when you encounter a situation, you’ll likely need to spend a couple more microseconds contemplating whether to respond to a situation with the most efficient method or with the flashy, risky, less effective method that you’ve been using so often.
Similarly, I prefer playing against others who play to win. Only then are you able to practice against all the ticks and cheesy tactics that will matter in tourney play. If someone ignores their cheapest, most efficient moves in casuals, that to me suggests that they’re practicing other components of their game (which I do sometimes) and means that I’ll be slightly less prepared going into my next real competition.
Also, I actually find that a huge majority of players play too honestly (no repeated wall dives, tick throws, or traps). So to reciprocate, I tend to temper my strategy as well to my detriment. I’m sometimes more hesitant on using cheesier tactics and less effective at performing them when it counts because I don’t practice them as much as I should and don’t have the right “mentality” at crucial points.
The ideal I have for ST casuals is the classic Thomas Osaki legend: play to the ultimate effectiveness of your character using whatever means regardless of whether you’re facing a pro or a beginner. That’s the quickest way to get better. Or put another way, do I really want to practice an extra few hundred hours simply because I wasted the time I had on flashy combos that I don’t care much about (although this varies from person to person)?
No holds barred was the way I used to play online before GGPO (and of course, got my fair share of folks quitting on me). Unfortunately, as of right now, I generally don’t closely follow the ideal anymore and subsequently don’t get as much value per hour of practice as I could be getting. I try to play as all the characters every time I have an ST session just to feel more balanced. So if you play me before I’m ready to “play to win,” then I probably won’t be as cheap (BTW, ShinVega, the example you used almost sounds like me, except that I haven’t played you in quite some time)
Since many folks rely on online play for practice nowadays, I think it’d be great if there was a flag to signify whether you’re playing for FUN or WIN. That way, those users who are looking for fun (actually a misnomer since winning is fun too; “fun” simply represents casual play) can enjoy their more relaxed play and those trying to hone a winning formula can try out the cheapest tactics they can think of without feeling bad and without any hard feelings.
I do understand that it can feel frustrating playing at your best against another good player for matches on end. That’s why it’s important to always focus on how to improve your strategies/execution instead of delving on the mere fact that you’re being beaten by cheesier strategies, which is a loser’s mentality. Nothing is more rewarding IMO when someone takes the momentum with your traditional cheap play, another person finds a solution and counters back, and then the first person finds a way to get around that solution, etc. And nothing is more annoying to me than when someone you just instilled that knowledge to leaves with that strategic gem yet still feels you did them a disservice by playing to win. But for me, just knowing that all my practice will pay off far more than holding back my punches leaves me satisfied.
OK, end of stream of consciousness; my apologies if what I just wrote doesn’t make any sense (early morning writing = NO). SweetJV covered what I had to say but since I had already written this and then fell asleep, I may as well submit it anyway because I know diehard ST players go for every morsel of opinion they can get, what I call the “reading to win” strategy. :wgrin:
Anyway, the topic brought back sweet memories from SNES HF 2-player mode, when people could switch characters every match, regardless of who was winning.